Email marketing campaigns and follow up telephone calls are the staple diet of the construction industry marketer.
They work. Companies do get business out of emails – why else would they continue to use them? But email marketing won’t be enough for much longer.
The reason why construction sells through email is that much of the construction industry still communicates primarily through email. Email has taken over from the fax almost completely. It has muscled in on much of the postal service. But email isn’t the only show in town any more.
The traditional holy trinity of email, phone calls and face-to-face meetings is to be disrupted by new social tools that enable relationships to emerge, form and develop online.
Unsolicited marketing emails continually evade spam filters and make it into your inbox, but social tools have better filters; other users. Sales messages are ignored, flagged and blocked by professional, focused users, and social tools encourage this ‘crowd filtering’ of unsolicited spam.
If a professional only communicates with the outside world by email, then they may choose a product on the strength of email marketing messages. But when those same professionals take their heads out of the inboxes, will your company still be stuck in their inbox?
Perhaps it is time to see how else you might meet construction professionals, other than by evading their spam filters and sidestepping their gatekeepers. Perhaps it is time to look to meet them in a more equal world.
Photo: Spam Shrine by Arnold (creative commons)
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